Leaders and Strategies in Real Life: 4/11/17

Instead of studying leadership, why not spend some time studying leaders and strategies in the wild? You can learn a lot from leadership experts, but you always see the leader and what he or she does through the expert’s personal lens. Supplement that learning with studying real leaders in real life situations and draw your own conclusions. The posts in this series will help you.

Every week I’ll point you to articles by and about real leaders in real situations and to articles about how real companies are faring in the marketplace. Read them. Think about them. Draw your own lessons and conclusions from them. Then try to apply those lessons in your own real life.

This week I’m pointing you to articles about Abigail Johnson, Debra Lee, jerks who can’t run a company, Satya Nadella, and David Rockefeller

“The tech industry has a problem with ‘bro culture.’ People have been complaining about it for years. Yet nobody has done much to fix it. That may finally change, if the people in charge of Silicon Valley — venture capitalists, who control the money — start to realize that the real problem with tech bros is not just that they’re boorish jerks. It’s that they’re boorish jerks who don’t know how to run companies.”

“Both these descriptions are caricatures. But they point to an underlying truth: how radically the world’s biggest software firm has changed in the short time since Mr Nadella took charge in early 2014.”

“Networks, part-public, part hidden, were his speciality. As a Rockefeller, whose millions had bolstered Rockefeller University and the Rockefeller Centre and whose Picassos, Matisses and Cézannes filled the Museum of Modern Art, he was a fixture on the New York social, cultural and political scene. He did great things for the city, helping to revive Lower Manhattan and to build the World Trade Centre; while also holding its feet to the fire, during its bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, by demanding savage budget cuts and the sacking of thousands of workers. From his first job, as secretary to Fiorello La Guardia, every mayor of New York was drawn into his net.”